A lot of people will never wake up

(As of August 5, the discussion in this thread continues. Also see in this thread a breakdown of the number of deaths at the World Trade Center on 9/11.)

Regarding the report that an aide to Prime Minister Brown says that one in 11 Muslims in Britain pro-actively supports suicide bombers, Jeff in England writes: “If this doesn’t wake people up I don’t know what will short of another terrorist attack.”

To which I replied:

It’s old hat. A year ago a poll said that 12 percent of Muslims in Britain support terrorism, so one out of 11 is less than that.

It doesn’t matter. Nothing will make people change but actual disasters, and one or two or three disasters won’t do it. There’s no point in even thinking about it or hoping or wondering what will “wake people up.”

It is built into human nature not to see a threat, but to think that everything’s ok. Nothing will change this.

And here is something that will underscore my point. Several hundred people above the impact point in the South Tower of the World Trade Center died, because AFTER the North Tower had been hit by an airliner, and flames and smoke were gushing out and scores of people were leaping to their death from a thousand feet up in the air, the people in the South Tower, looking at this apocalypse unfold a few yards from their own windows, thought that they should remain in their offices and do a normal day’s work (a normal day’s work with people leaping to their death outside their windows!), rather than leave the building as fast as they could. So when the South Tower was hit by the second plane, 17 minutes after the North Tower was hit by the first plane, almost all the people still alive in the upper stories of the South Tower were trapped and they died when the building collapsed 56 minutes later. And this was the World Trade Center, which just eight years earlier had been hit by a terrorist bomb aimed at toppling one tower into the other and killing tens of thousands of people. Yes, there was a PA announcement telling people that the building was “secure” and that they should stay in their offices. But why did they heed that announcment, when the Ultimate Disaster was already occurring? And these aren’t slugs we’re talking about. These were intelligent, high-end people, working in investment banking, people like Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath (two of the four people to escape alive from above the impact point in the South Tower).

Yes, many people did leave the South Tower before it was struck. But many others stayed in their offices, or, like Praimnath and a group of his co-workers of Fuji Bank (all of whom died except himself), even returned to their offices after going down to the lobby, because a security guard said they should. If intelligent, active, competent people in that situation, in the midst of a catastrophe of that scale, did not “wake up” and get themselves out of the South Tower as fast as they could go, regardless of what anyone told them about the building’s being “secure,” and regardless of any social pressure they may have felt (which Praimnath said he felt) about being a good worker and staying on the job, then why should a mere news report saying that nine percent of Muslims in Britain support terrorism wake anyone up to the danger of Islam?

What this shows is some bottom-line limitation in human nature. For a large portion of the human race, only when catastrophe personally and directly strikes them, will their attitudes and behavior change.

And nothing will change this.

- end of initial entry -

Alan Levine writes:

Cannot disagree with your immediate thesis that nothing but repeated catastrophe will wake people up; but I would differ from you in one thing. It is not “human nature,” but the sign of a culture that is deathly ill. I have heard many people—notably of course, the neocons with their “Islamofascism” nonsense—compare our present situation with the 1930s, as though that were the maximal possible example of suicidal insanity. But the truth is that we have gone far, far beyond the appeasement trends of that period in relation to our present enemies. I cannot think of any historical instance of a culture trying to commit suicide that compares to ours. That includes later Rome.

LA replies:

This is a very interesting point. But I have to ask this. Was the event that triggered these thoughts in me—namely the failure of a large number of intelligent, competent human beings in the South Tower to respond instinctively to the catastrophe in the North Tower and simply LEAVE—related to civilizational suicide of the liberal type? After all, these people weren’t dealing with some cultural threat, where the usual liberal suicidal impulses get triggered. They were dealing with an immediate practical situation of undeniable cataclysmic proportions, and yet their minds and instincts did not tell them, “Get out of here, now.”

Was that a symptom of a deathly ill culture? Or was it a symptom of something more basic and general in human nature?

Consider the Titanic. Wasn’t it the same kind of thing, a basic human complacency, and not a “deathly ill culture,” that prevented the captain and crew from being more alert to the likely dangers?

Mr. Levine replies:

I would reply this way: the people in the tower may have been reacting, or failing to react, with a sort of passivity, or failure to react, a failure to understand “this means me,” that is characteristic of a decadent culture. I suspect the average peasant, or aristocrat, or anyone else in an earlier culture, present at such an event would have simply said “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

At the risk of sounding a discordant note, I wonder if TV has had an influence here. It was just distant enough, to them, to seem like something on the tube.

Re your remarks on the “Titanic.” It was not due to normal complacency—after all people do not expect disaster—but a recent tradition of real recklessness and sheer bad seamanship that had developed among the competing North Atlantic lines. This point was made many years ago by Geoffrey Marcus in his book, “The Maiden Voyage.” Normal, prudent seamen in a fog with bad ice conditions would have slowed down, and probably taken more southerly, if longer course.

A reader writes:

I’m confused. If only several hundred died above impact in South Tower, and impact in North was even higher, meaning it could only have been another several hundred at best, where’s the 3000 deaths?

LA replies:

Here are numbers from the Wikipedia article on the 9/11 attack.

Total fatalities

2,974 fatalities not including the 19 hijackers:
246 on the four planes
2,603 in New York City in the towers and on the ground
125 at Pentagon

New York fatalities

2,603 in New York City in the towers and on the ground:

343 New York City Fire Department firefighters
23 New York City Police Department officers
37 Port Authority Police Department officers
1366 people died who were at or above the floors of impact in the North Tower
As many as 600 people were killed instantly or trapped at or above the floors of impact in the South Tower

So,

2,603 dead on ground in New York, consisting of:
1,366 dead in North tower
600 dead in South Tower
403 officers and firemen

That adds up to 2,369. That’s 234 short of 2,603.

However, the article also says: “At least 200 people jumped to their deaths ” Are they counting the 200 who jumped separately from those who died in the buildings?

In that case, we’re up to 2,569, very close to the total of 2,603.

Reader replies:

This would seem to indicate that a lot of the people in the South Tower did evacuate, regardless of the stupid announcements. Because the hit on the South was lower down, which should have meant many more people were above the impact line than in the North Tower.

LA replies:

Rough estimate: if there were 1,366 people above the 90th floor of the North Tower, meaning 1,366 people in the top 20 stories of the building, then in the top 30 stories of the South Tower (i.e., above the 78th floor), there would be 1.5 times that amount, which we’ll round off to 2,000. So (again this is pure guestimate) of the 2,000 people above the 78th floor of the South Tower, 1,400 went down before the plane hit, while 600 remained.

So my thesis concerning some bottom-line insensibility in the human race, which keeps people from reacting and saving themselves even when Biblical-scale apocalypse is occurring right before their eyes, describes about one-third of the human race.

LA continues:

Another question I’ve always had is: how many people jumped from each tower? We only hear about people jumping from the North Tower, never from the South. In fact, we have so many stories about the people trapped in the upper stories of the North Tower, their calls to their families, and so on, but much fewer accounts of the the people in the South Tower.

Simon N. writes (August 5):

You write: “Was the event that triggered these thoughts in me—namely the failure of a large number of intelligent, competent human beings in the South Tower to respond instinctively to the catastrophe in the North Tower and simply LEAVE—related to civilizational suicide of the liberal type?”

Growing up in Northern Ireland, something I learned was that when a bomb goes off or there’s a bomb scare, you leave the area as calmly and quickly as possible—don’t hang around just outside the cordoned off area.

Here in London, on the morning of 7/7. my American wife insisted on going in to work by train in the middle of town, after the first bombs had gone off, when reports were unclear but I had told her it was clearly a terrorist attack, which she didn’t deny. She called me from the train station (around the time the bus bomb went off), still refused to be dissuaded, and took the last train in before they closed the network, trapping her in town. Her reason—she had a lot of work to do and didn’t want to look bad.

Mostly this is human nature, *but* the BBC did play its part by playing down suggestions it was an attack, and insisting it was probably an electrical fault, long after the evidence made this unlikely. Only when it was 100% certain it was an attack did their reporting switch. And people still trust the BBC—even those like my wife who intellectually *know* it routinely lies to us, still end up going along with it.

LA replies:

You’re suggesting two things, first, that the failure to respond is due to the reigning liberal order that wants to deny the existence of enemies, and second, that the failure to respond is the result of the absence of a learned skill or learned routine. You’re saying that if an event similar to the attack on the WTC had occurred in Northern Ireland, everyone would have left the South Tower properly because that would have been the routine. This doesn’t get rid of the “mental failure” I’ve been discusing in this entry, but shifts it from the individual level to the level of society and government.

The suggestion is that the fault is not in the individual souls of the people who didn’t leave the South Tower, but in the City’s lack of disaster planning and preparedness, resulting, most horrifically, in the Port Authority’s announcements in the South Tower that the building was “secure” and that people should remain in or return to their offices. The City supposedly was all geared up for a terrorist attack. It had a vast high-tech emergency command post in Building 7 of the WTC. It had all kinds of protocols in place in the event of an attack. But it didn’t have protocols in place whereby the Port Authority running the WTC (and people running other buildings in the city) knew that if any disaster or possible terrorist attack occurred, the WTC should be evacuated immediately.

And that is amazing. The authorities KNEW the city was being targeted. There had been the 1993 attack aimed at toppling the Towers—which if it had succeeded would have been infinitely more catastrophic than 9/11. There had been the foiled subway fire bombing in ‘96 or ‘97 aimed at killing hundreds of people. Yet the City had not planted in its people and particularly in the people responsible for security in large buildings and most especially the WTC (which counterterrorism agencies knew was still being targeted by al Qaeda) that in the event of any explosion, fire, or other disaster the buildings should be evacuated.

Giuliani’s whole support for the presidency is based on his supposed effectivenss regarding terrorism. He became a national hero for his impressive personal demeanor after the attack, but was given a complete pass for his spectacular failures of substantive leadership before the attack.

Maybe he was too preoccupied with his personal life. We know for a fact that he is too pre-occupied with his personal life today to be a proper presidential candidate or president, as shown by his amazing statement on the Barbara Walters program that he would include his third wife in Cabinet meetings. He’s smitten by Judi, and not properly focused on the country he wants to lead. Just as the evidence is that he was smitten by Judi in 1999, 2000, and 2001, and was not really focused on protecting the city. And before Judi, he was smitten by Chrystine Lategano, an aide of his with whom he was carrying on a virtually open adulterous affair during his mayoralty.

Sorry for taking the discussion in a completely different direction. But now that I’ve done so, let me add that according to a big article about the third Mrs. Giuliani in the September Vanity Fair, there are indications (see the last several paragraphs of the article) that the former mayor’s ardor for her has cooled and that his eye is roving again.

A female reader writes:

Wow, I never thought of some of these things you’re saying toward the end, that Giuliani was only half paying attention to things in his second term, having affairs, smitten with Judi, now smitten again, and beginning to be unsmitten. Wow. And yet the polls are still showing him ahead. Talk about when will people wake up!

(Note: See further discussion of Giuliani’s personal life here.)

Simon N. writes:

You write: “You’re saying that if an event similar to the attack on the WTC had occurred in Northern Ireland, everyone would have left the South Tower properly because that would have been the routine”

Actually, no—the Omagh bombing killed so many people because the bomb went off in an area the crowd had been moved to, away from the cordoned area the bomb was “supposed” to be. Those who died were aware there was a bomb scare but did not depart the area—admittedly the dead included Portuguese tourists and I expect many people did have the sense to make themselves scarce. But the instinctive tendency seems to be to do what the police say, which is usually not “go away, go home” but “leave here, assemble there”—people become strangely passive and non-thinking when ordered by authority, and it takes an effort of will to overcome this.

Simon N. writes:

You write: “The suggestion is that the fault is not in the individual souls of the people who didn’t leave the South Tower, but in the City’s lack of disaster planning and preparedness, resulting, most horrifically, in the Port Authority’s announcements in the South Tower that the building was ‘secure’ and that people should remain in or return to their offices.”

Yes. The Authorities have a particular threat assessment system that either seeks to minimise disruption by downplaying risks—typically the first response—or else uses the “precautionary principle” that goes massively overboard long after the danger is over.

The trouble is that individuals allow the Authority’s judgement to overwhelm their own “gift of fear”—their own threat assessment abilities. For individuals it’s usually better to leave, go home, leave the area. Little is lost, and it avoids the risk of dying. But Authority thinks differently, it goes with group-think, with whatever the sanctioned response is.

LA replies:

Based on what you’ve said, any way we look at it, the prognosis is grim, what with the combination of PC authorities with a population that naturally follows authority. Whether wisdom comes from leaders, or from the people, it must come from somewhere.

Dan K. writes:

The prognosis is worse than grim. Like the U.S. military [1, 2], civilian authority, ranging from small city councils to the heights of the bureaucracy in Washington. D.C. (including the chief executive ), is in essence a charade of public relations reigning over substance in an individual’s assent into a job. Those who get to the top almost invariably are people who have learned to game the system and whose assets consist chiefly of a bag of tricks to assure a continued rise in the system rather than a developed substantive knowledge base to use effectively when exercising authority. Men and women of talent rarely rise in such a milieu. Only if the person in charge has the cunning to recognize his deficits (fat chance given the inflated ego of such people) and surrounds himself with technocratic experts that he actually listens to will intelligent decisions during a crisis be made in a timely manner. Usually stupid decisions are made and the result is that more public relations BS papers over the resulting agony.

[ 1 ] CRISIS In COMMAND. Mismanagement in the Army. by Richard A. & Savage, Paul L. Gabriel (Hardcover—1978)

[ 2 ] The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs by Donald Vandergriff (Hardcover—2002)

Dimitri writes:

Regarding those people who wanted to exit the South tower but hesitated after the authorities told them to stay. I can imagine myself in such a situation. I also tend to obey authorities, though hesitate if they are right.

I’ll tell you my dream: I am at the doctor’s office and they are going to take the blood test. For that, they want to make a cut on my neck. I realize that it is not the right place to take the blood, but cannot speak up. Because, you know, you cannot tell a doctor that you suspect he is a … vampire. Here I woke up, because it was only a dream.

LA replies:

That dream captures the conflict within us when we feel the need to resist authority. As Stanley Praimnath tells it, he and several co-workers from Fuji Bank, including the top executives in the firm, had gone down to the lobby in the South Tower, and when they got there a guard told them, “Go back to your offices, the building is secure.” So they all turned around and headed back to the elevators. Stanley wasn’t comfortable about this. His co-workers said, “Come on Stan, come on Stan the Man, gotta get back to work.” And he went, even though, going up in the elevator, he had a bad feeling in his heart. And within moments of arriving back at his desk on the 81st floor, he saw United Flight 175 heading at him.

He obeyed ordinary social and job pressure, and doing so instantly brought him to what would have been death, except for his miraculous good fortune. All his co-workers died of course.

To resist your boss or superior because you think what he is telling you will lead to death, is a heavy thing to do. It is to say that you see your boss not as benevolent but as deadly dangerous. I think that is what is conveyed by Dimitri’s dream where Dimitri is thinking his doctor is a vampire but he doesn’t want to tell him.

Social conformism is a primal force in human life. In the famous Milgram experiment, people in a lab were induced to inflicting increasing amounts of electric shocks on test subjects (they thought they were administering electro shocks, but the subjects were just acting and pretending to be hurt). As the “subjects” began to complain more and more, and say, “Stop the experiment, let me out of here,” the “scientist” kept ordering the people administering the electric current (who thought they were helping in an experiment but in reality they themselves were the subjects of the experiment) to keep increasing the electricity. This continued until the “subjects” were moaning and writhing in pain, Some people refused to obey the scientist’s instructions, but a significant number, perhaps a majority, remained obedient all the way. They were horribly conflicted about doing this, they were in moral agony about the pain they were causing the “subjects,” but they felt they had to conform to what the scientist was telling them, in order to make the experiment a success.

So there is human nature for you—or at least the human nature of a very large portion of the human race. People who, in order to please their boss (or the “scientist”), will be willing to torture people, will also be willing to die rather than displease their boss.

Now, when we combine this basic conformist feature of human nature with modern liberalism and political correctness, in which the respected authorities of society are telling us to commit suicide, we can see why we’re in such trouble.

Robert C. writes:

Do you think that you may be guilty of not thinking prudently by the fact that you live in New York instead of out in the country where you would be safer from an atom bomb?

I must have the same defect, if it is a defect, because I won’t leave the Washington DC area.

LA replies:

It’s a fair point.

James P. writes:

“Actually, no—the Omagh bombing killed so many people because the bomb went off in an area the crowd had been moved to, away from the cordoned area the bomb was “supposed” to be. Those who died were aware there was a bomb scare but did not depart the area—admittedly the dead included Portuguese tourists and I expect many people did have the sense to make themselves scarce. But the instinctive tendency seems to be to do what the police say, which is usually not “go away, go home” but “leave here, assemble there”—people become strangely passive and non-thinking when ordered by authority, and it takes an effort of will to overcome this.”

We had a “disaster drill” at work recently, and the plan is to assemble en masse at a preselected rally point some distance from the building. I am here to tell you that in the event of an actual disaster, the LAST place I’m going is the preselected rally point. That is exactly the place the bad guys will target for their follow-up attack, and they will almost certainly have access to the “disaster plan” before they cause the disaster.

I’m going to do what seems best for me at the time, regardless of what the authorities say, and good luck to everyone else.

A. Zarkov writes:

Rick Rescorla, security director for Morgan Stanley, anticipated both the first and second attacks on the World Trade Center. He warned the Port Authority (owner of the WTC) in 1992 that the parking garage was vulnerable to a truck bomb. PA ignored his warning. As predicted, terrorists hit the garage with a truck bomb in 1993 in exactly the manner Rescorla foresaw. As a result of the bombing, PA tightened up garage security eliminating this vulnerability. Rescorla then issued a report warning that the terrorists would crash a commercial aircraft into the WTC building complex. Again his warnings went unheeded by both Morgan Stanley and PA. He even recommended that Morgan Stanley leave Manhattan, but they refused as their lease would not expire until 2006. When the planes hit in 2001, Rescorla was not a bit surprised and the Morgan Stanley employees were well practiced in evacuation. After AA flight 11 struck Tower 1, Rescorla evacuated Morgan Stanley employees from Tower 2 ignoring advice to stay put. Alas he returned to the building to make sure everyone was out, and died in the WTC 2 collapse. As a result of Rescorla’s prescience and heroism virtually all of the 2800 Morgan Stanley employees survived the attack. Only Rescorla, his three deputies and two other employees fell victim.

The Rescorla story was covered in a documentary “The Man Who Predicted 9/11” broadcast on The History Channel in the U.S. and over Channel 4 in the UK. You can read his biography “Heart of a Soldier” or look him up in Wikipedia for more information.

I certainly would have ignored advice to stay in the building. I have absolutely no confidence in the kind of people running government, industry, business and academia. Time and time again I have seen wise advice ignored. To become a manager you must be optimistic to the point of delusion. There are many managers who explicitly tell their people not to bring them bad news. Rescorla was a Cassandra and Americans don’t like Cassandras. I think mistrust of authority and dogma is an in-born personality trait, so most people will simply run off the cliff with the other lemmings.

LA replies:

I’ve seen many tv programs and read a good deal about the 9/11 attack and survivors’ stories. I’m amazed had not heard of Rick Rescorla before now. I recommend the linked Wikipedia article about him. However, Wikipedia does not provide any quote or documentation to back up the statement that Rescorla warned Morgan Stanley that airliners might be used as weapons against the WTC. I want to know more about that.

James W. writes:

James Russell Lowell: Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: you are dreadfully like other people.

There have been innumerable studies that show the same thing—70 percent of us will agree with anything a group agrees with unanimously, no matter how absurd. Of course, that still leaves 30 percent to divide the duties of either A) manipulating the unfortunate 70 or B) not believing the absurd, which is shown to then ruin the compliance numbers. One spoilsport is sometimes sufficient. The first duty of an honest man is sometimes just to state the obvious.

The Milgram numbers are more serious still. Here the trusted authorities are in white coats, and the subject is alone except for authority.. The number in compliance is 97 percent. Dreadfully like other people. Milgram could not get a handle on the 3 percent, so you are left to your own devices there.

What can be reliably assumed though is that the normal, and even the well-adjusted, are included in the larger number, since 3 percent is to small a raft to hold even a poor opinion of human nature.

That is who we are, like dogs in a litter. We seek our place.

Vishal M. writes:

Dear Mr Auster, I think that trust in Authorities is peculiarly American (or maybe Western attitude). That’s the price you pay for State’s (relative) efficiency). Here in India, the State is manifestly inefficient in the simplest of undertakings (such as maintaining a road or water supply), that we feel no urge at all to obey Authority even in a normal time, let alone a disaster. In Third World it is each family to itself and a man must look out for his family at all times.

Another reason—Indians just don’t care that much about their jobs or work. Our own hide is much more precious to us than any commitment to a job on which another person may be depending.

Here is more on Rick Rescorla:

Rick Rescorla was calling from the 44th floor of the World Trade Center, icy calm in the crisis. When Rescorla was a platoon leader in Vietnam, his men called him Hard Core, because they had never seen anyone so absurdly unflappable in the face of death. Now he was vice president for corporate security at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., and a jumbo jet had just plowed into the north tower. The voices of officialdom were crackling over the loudspeakers in the south tower, urging everyone to stay put: Please do not leave the building. This area is secure. Rescorla was ignoring them.

“The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate,” he said during a quick call to his best friend, Dan Hill, who had indeed been watching the disaster unfolding on TV. “They said it’s just Building One. I told them I’m getting my people the [expletive] out of here.”

Keep moving, Rescorla commanded over his megaphone while Hill listened. Keep moving.

“Typical Rescorla,” Hill recalls. “Incredible under fire.”

Morgan Stanley lost only six of its 2,700 employees in the south tower on Sept. 11, an isolated miracle amid the carnage. And company officials say Rescorla deserves most of the credit. He drew up the evacuation plan. He hustled his colleagues to safety. And then he apparently went back into the inferno to search for stragglers. He was the last man out of the south tower after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and no one seems to doubt that he would’ve been again last month if the skyscraper hadn’t collapsed on him first. One of the company’s secretaries actually snapped a photo of Rescorla with his megaphone that day, a 62-year-old mountain of a man coolly sacrificing his life for others.

LA comments:

In fact, while Rescorla was a heroic man and everything he did on 9/11 was great, the 2,800 Morgan Stanley employees in the South Tower would have survived in any case, since Morgan Stanley’s offices were between the 59th and 74th floor, all below the impact point, as shown in this chart. The approximately 600 people in the South Tower who died were all above the 78th floor. If Fuji Bank (79th to 82nd floors), where Stanley Praimnath worked, and Euro Brokers (84th floor), where Brian Clark worked, not to mention the Aon Insurance Corporation (98th to 105th floors, 200 employees killed on 9/11), had had a Rick Rescorla, many people who died would have lived.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 03, 2007 02:59 PM | Send